📈 Click-through rate (CTR) and its game-changing importance for video ads (Google Ads)

This article will provide you with actionable insights and strategies to elevate your advertising game.

Ready to dive in and discover how to turn clicks into conversions? Let’s get started!

What’s CTR?

Clickthrough rate (CTR) is a crucial metric in digital marketing that represents the proportion of impressions that result in clicks. Essentially, when you run any type of pay-per-click advertising campaign—whether on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, or Google—the clickthrough rate is the ratio of users who click on your ad (clicks) to those who have seen your ad (impressions).

CTR serves as a fundamental indicator for gauging market interest in your offer, underlining its importance.

What does high or low CTR indicate?

• High CTR: This suggests that your ad is highly relevant to your audience, resonating well and prompting them to act.

• Low CTR: Conversely, a low CTR indicates that some aspect of your ad—whether the targeting, messaging or the offer itself—is not adequately engaging or relevant to your audience to motivate them to proceed.

In summary, CTR is the key metric that measures the effectiveness of your ad in attracting potential customers.

Now that you understand the critical role of CTR in your advertising strategies, it’s time to explore what constitutes a “good” clickthrough rate.

A good clickthrough rate can vary based on the following factors:

• Specific property that you are advertising on (search, display, shopping, video campaigns, and specific placements which will we deep dive into a bit later)

• The platform you are advertising on (will be focused on Google video ads in this article)

That brings us to the next question, what’s good CTR?

When it comes to Google video ads most advertisers judge CTRs based on the number shown in bulk on campaign/ad group/ad level where there’s just blended CTR shown. But most of them are not aware of how benchmarks for good CTR vary depending on the placement of the ads and need to be prospected on placement breakdown and see how CTR looks like on instream placement, in-feed, and shorts and see which segment is underperforming and work on improving it.

Let’s say roughly that CTR of 1%+ is solid but again it depends on where the ad was shown (how much of the ad spend algorithm pushed to in-stream and how much in in-feed). If most of the ad spend went to in-feed then this is astonishing CTR but if instream traffic dominated placement-wise then not amazing. In this case, we are prospecting CTR as a blended (all placement types), as shown in the screenshot below:

Let’s take a look at the first campaign. It’s the campaign with just one ad and it can be prospected on the campaign level/ad level. We are seeing a CTR of 1.09% for the selected time frame but let’s analyze it more granularly.

If you want to deep dive into ad spend on the placement level you will find that report here:

“Insights and reports” > “When and where ad showed” > “Where ad showed”

Again you will see blended CTR numbers but in this section, you can see that more than half of the ad spend is not showing placements because these impressions didn’t get a click or view but let’s drill down a bit more.

When you click on “add filter” and select “YouTube channel” that will filter all visible channels and how CTR looks like on in-stream placement.

We are seeing here just 1/4 of the ad spend which went to in-stream where we had view or click with an awesome CTR of 7.56% but what about the rest of 3/4 of the ad spend?

Another part of the ad spend went to in-feed:

After deep diving into the specific placements where our ad was shown, we can see that more than half of the ad spend went to “other” placements which is not shown due to not having a view or click.

We can see here that the CTR for in-feed looks solid but seeing here a CTR lower than 0.20% would mean that your CTR on in-feed placement is not good. That's a signal that you should test new thumbnails as that’s something that is affecting CTR heavily when your ad is shown in in-feed placement. 

Analyzing the ads CTR-wise this way helps understand better how your CTR looks on a more granular level and which elements of the ad should be improved in order to bump up CTR, is it improving/adding thumbnails and boosting CTR’s on in feed or testing new creative approaches for finding a formula to up the CTR on in-stream placement.

Note: Analysing ads on this level helps understanding if you have bad CTR maybe Google is pushing most of the ad spend to in-feed placement where the benchmarks for CTR are a lot lower. That might be the case as well as we saw it on a couple of accounts so a warm recommendation is to check CTR’s more granularity in order to find out what you need to improve to up your beloved CTR.

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